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How to Make Your Drupal Website Multilingual

As the site manager for acquia.com, I had a lot to think about when we originally decided to translate the site into other languages. Why are we translating? What will we be translating?

How will we handle pages that aren’t translated? What modules do we need to add? What translation services will we use? How will we maintain all languages? What are the best ways to achieve my goals in Drupal 7? My past experience with translation in Drupal was with a Drupal 6 website and we did a multisite install, so we shared modules and themes but had separate websites and databases.

Why are you translating your website?
There are many reason to translate your website: increase site traffic, increase sales, competitive edge, courtesy for customers. Acquia was looking to start expanding business in the French speaking market so we kicked off our first website translation effort in French. Since we have launched our French site, we have increased our site traffic from France by 30 percent.

Webinar: Learn about D8's multilingual support

What happens if you don’t want to translate a page?
Depending on your site or your business, it might not make sense to translate all content on your website. If you don’t translate all your pages, you need to make a decision on how to handle those pages that aren’t translated. We decided to translate our main product pages and all static content such as our contact us and about us pages.

Ways to Translate content in Drupal:
Drupal 7 had some improvements for translation capabilities and our two options were content translation (AKA node translation) or entity translation.

Content Translation = one node per translation

Entity Translation = one node with many translation

Here are some differences between the two options we discovered.

Node translation

Entity translation

Only works on nodes

Works with any entity

One node per language

One entity for ALL languages

Uses core node title "field"

Requires Title module

Views language filtering works

Required a patch to filter on entity language

XML Sitemap works

XML Sitemap could not filter on entity language

Block translation is tricky

Bean block module

Multiple menu items per language

Single menu item per language

What Modules will you need to add?
With entity translation there are some requirements:

What translation services will we use?
This is really up to you. There are many services out there that provide translation for varying costs. The services I’ve used are Transperfect and Lingotek. You’ll need to find a service that can cater to your business and once you find a good translation service stick with them so your message stays consistent.

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How will we maintain all languages?
I’m not sure I’ll ever find the best way to individually maintain each language variation on our sites but having a change management process is the right way to start. All site changes now need to be considered for translation.

The challenge here is to getting your whole company to think translation first. This is a new way of thinking when you step into translation for the first time. A small text change on your website will now take three times as long.

When we launch a new page, we do the translation process during design, this way our design is created to easily handle the longer character set of our languages.

How we did it:
We decided to initially go with entity translation for acquia.com, but after implementing the French language with entity we decided to migrate to node translation because of issues with several contrib modules e.g. menu blocks, breadcrumbs (via Delta module) and XML site map. We are actually now using a mix of node translation and entity translation.

To send our content to our translators, we have created a view to export nodes we want to translate into XML, send the XML file to our translators and when they send it back we copy and paste content into the new nodes. We still need to find a management system for our translations.

We have learned a lot and still have more to learn. None of this would have been possible without the lead engineer on the team Dave Myburgh - he has made all of our translation dreams possible.

Katelyn Fogarty

Former Director, Digital Marketing, Acquia Inc.

At Acquia my main responsibility is managing and maintaining Acquia.com. I've been managing Drupal websites for about seven years now, but started off as a web and graphics designer.

I transitioned into a front-end web developer in a marketing organization, started building and managing Drupal sites then moved into marketing management.

I came from a mix of consumer and business marketing prior to Acquia and with my strong skills in design and development I have been able to move quickly with Drupal and love it!